“The CIA opened a Twitter account last month and has used cheeky humor to win a large following in a short time. On Monday, the account sent out this announcement: ‘No, we don’t know your password, so we can’t send it to you.’ It went viral, with more than 12,000 retweets,” Barton wrote.

“As it happens, the NSA files we examined included 1,152 ‘minimized U.S. passwords,’ meaning passwords to American e-mail and chat accounts intercepted from U.S. data links. Don’t expect tech support from Langley, but the CIA does have access to that raw traffic.”

The reporter declined to elaborate on the agency’s actual knowledge of rapper Tupac’s whereabouts.